PIE5 – Trans-European Express

All being well I will launch the 5th “Pi In The Sky” this Saturday morning from Cambridgeshire. The intention is to get the balloon to float all day rather than burst, and the projected flight path takes it over Holland and Germany. The batteries will last for 24 hours by which time it will be out of range of our radio receiver network anyway.

The payload will carry a model A Raspberry Pi, plus an Arduino Mini Pro, a UBlox GPS receiver, and 2 Radiometrix NTX2 transmitters. The latter will be on nearby frequencies primarily to avoid conflict with some other flights this weekend, but also to allow those with SDR (Software Defined Radio) receivers to listen to and decode the signals from both transmitters.

If you have an SDR and want to do this, check my article. If you’ve not tracked amateur high altitude balloons before, check the UKHAS tracking guide.

This will be one of 3 flights from the same location on Saturday:

Launch Announcement

On Saturday the 13th of April there will be three launches from the Cambridge area under meteorological balloons. Two of these (PIE5 and AVA) are configured to ascend to a certain altitude (>100,000 feet) and then float rather than burst. The expected path takes the balloons out of UK air space and continue onwards over Europe. The final flight (XABEN) will be a slow ascent and then a burst to land in Holland.

All balloons will be transmitting RTTY telemetry on the 70cms band.

The first balloon is flying a Raspberry Pi which will be transmitting live SSDV images back to the ground by a pair of transmitters to double the bandwidth. The data is RTTY 300 baud 8N2. The frequencies will be at 434.070 and 434.074Mhz. The balloon call sign is $$PIE.

The second balloon is flying a 70cms tracker on 434.450Mhz 50 baud 7N2, additionally once it enters air space where the airborne use of APRS is permitted a second APRS transmitter will enable with the call sign M0UPU-11.